United States District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney of the Central District of California has ruled that “[i]nordinate and unpredictable delay” in California death penalty cases post-trial
has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State. It has resulted in a system in which arbitrary factors, rather than legitimate ones like the nature of the crime or the date of the death sentence, determine whether an individual will actually be executed. And it has resulted in a system that serves no penological purpose. Such a system is unconstitutional.
Therefore, Judge Carney vacated the death sentence of Ernest Jones. Jones v. Chappell, ___ F.Supp.2d ___, 2014 WL 3567365 (C.D. Cal. July 16, 2014).